A Sea Dark and Silent
by Adara
Summary: D.Gray-Man/Cthulhu Mythos. There are things out there far worse than the Earl and the Noah. Gen, rating for violence, AU by virtue of having been started pre-Alma arc.
1. Chapter 1

Warnings, because yes, they are legion: a minor character extrapolated on (General Klaud Nine) and given a major POV, fanon everywhere, the implication that organized religion is actually a front for Great Old Ones, major character death, intentional anachronisms for the sake of avoiding colonialism in naming, and unofficial romanizations for several names (I'm sorry, I can't bring myself to spell it as anything other than Theodore). There are also historicially accurate skanky race issues here (Victorian Europe!), and yes, that definitely merits a warning. Finally, a warning specific to this site: the original version of this uses punctuation marks as spacers between scenes. I have no idea if is going to strip these out or not; if a scene change seems abrupt, it's probably because the site stripped out a divider meant to denote a new POV.

Spoilers up to the current arc, and now a minor AU (mostly in regards to Timothy, as this was written before who his teacher would be was revealed in the manga).

"A Sea Dark and Silent," 1/7

_Nagoya, Japan _

_May 186X_

The real advantage of being a trouser-wearing, scar-faced American harlot who was a war hero too important and powerful to overtly censure was that no one in the Vatican actually gave a damn about what Exorcist-General Klaud Nine did as long as she did it away from the curious and adoring eyes of the public. Anything she did was automatically assumed to be embarrassing, horrific, blasphemous, or at least improper, or more often than not a combination of all four and as such they'd given up trying to change her and decided to leave her judgment to God. He always came calling for his most sinful apostles first, after all; Cross and Winters were long gone, while saintly old Theodore would probably live to rival Methuselah himself the same way old Kevin Jaeger had. Klaud was fairly certain that she would be next on the list, and she'd come to terms with that fact a long time ago. So had the Vatican, because to do anything else would have raised uncomfortable questions about the Black Order and by extension the authorities of the Catholic Church itself.

It was either going to be her or that boy of Theodore's with the temper who went next by that logic, anyway. Not that she was really holding her breath waiting for that one to happen any time soon, since his teacher's good behavior had probably earned him a reprieve. If her team (God rest their souls) could suffer for their teacher's behavior, then it stood to reason that Theodore's could be rewarded for their teacher's. It was sort of funny how taking responsibility for her girls made it so much easier to accept her fast-approaching place on the judgment list-- and so much more willing to take the bizarre and far-flung missions that were too dangerous or too far away or some combination of both for the more respectable Exorcist-Generals to take. The most important mission remaining was of course the cleanup of outlying regions, and both General Walker and General Theodore had been assigned to long-term cleanup positions. Theodore knew the Japanese language, had been to the country while there were still a few people living here and there in hiding (and, of course, brought back a souvenir most of the rest of the Order at times rather wished he hadn't), and had two team members who spoke the Chinese and Japanese languages. He was a natural choice to lead the mission at its most devastated place-- particularly since it was the most public cleanup, and kindly old Theodore in his cassock and thick glasses with his team of two converted natives and tall, strong-featured Marie made a picture that the public in Europe adored.

General Walker, now, she almost felt sorry for. Because he was a handsome young war hero (funny how that excused hideous facial scars on a man and not on a woman, wasn't it?) with a pretty assistant saved from any whisper of impropriety by her constantly-attendant older brother, Allen Walker got the less than enviable job of dealing with the Eastern Church and the cleanup in Russia. With Chief Lee in attendance to protect the virtue of his younger sister and to check the wireless infrastructure in the area, which was of course the worst part. What was the point of having a pretty assistant if her brother was always around watching? That was what Cross would have said, at least, and Allen was Cross' disciple. She refused to believe that he hadn't cracked Allen's wide-eyed innocence early on in their study together. There was no way he and Lenalee Lee weren't like that, or at least would be if Chief Lee hadn't taken it upon himself to become a one-man army in defense of his sister's good name.

That left Klaud to roam on smaller-scale cleanup assignments, going in where she was needed. Sometimes she went with a team and sometimes without one, since there was a cadre of Exorcists who'd been recruited during the war and thus didn't have a General of their own to follow. On this particular trip she'd left the whining Baron and the boy far too young to be doing this job in the capable hands of Miranda Lotte. Miranda was the only other Exorcist not otherwise assigned who could find her way around the motherhouse with a map, let alone take care of any kind of akuma cleanup. Klaud liked her well enough and wouldn't have minded bringing her along, but someone had to babysit the other two and it sure wasn't going to be Klaud. If they didn't have someone, the kid would be terrorizing the Baron within an hour. She had seen it happen before.

Her original assignment had been in a village in Nepal, of all places, and there hadn't been an akuma in sight. The strange happenings were caused by a piece of Innocence, as it turned out, but then the monks hadn't let her take it with her. It was a holy relic, they said, and the church couldn't take it. Since Klaud wasn't actually Catholic and the Order was barely running anymore let alone training new exorcists, she left it where it was and went on to the next place on her list: Ulaanbaatar, of all the unprounceable and godforsaken places to have to spend a few weeks. Mongolia was dusty and dry and completely wretched, and so when she got the missive to meet up with an Asia Branch Finder team (they still had Finders out of Shanghai? Bak Chang must have been paying them out of his own pocket... which was actually not surprising, since rumor had it the wealth of a branch of Chinese nobility and one of the founding families of the Order converged on Chief Chang and he had more money than God) in Harbin it was an absolute relief. Until they put her on a train and then a boat, that was, bound for Nagoya. Why couldn't it have been the Bookman who requested backup? He was in Bangkok, last she'd heard, or somewhere else in Indochina. No, he got to go off chasing obscure books in the tropics while she had to go to Japan.

So there she was, driving a carriage down a long-disused road from the makeshift port in Nagoya Harbor after she was unceremoniously left alone on the dock. The sailors from the Order were hardy enough to make the journey to Japan with an Exorcist onboard, but they weren't foolhardy enough to stay around when she was gone; Chang hired brave men, not complete idiots. He'd looked at her sort of askance when she asked for a carriage to be brought with her, but in the end he'd complied because Shanghai was perhaps the last place on the Earth where what an Exorcist wanted, an Exorcist got. Particularly when said Exorcist headed into the heart of Japan, perhaps the last place on the Earth where akuma were a real threat. She wasn't about to walk her burden around the island, and dragging it from a horse would have been ridiculous and impractical, so a carriage it was. Even though she must have looked positively absurd driving a European-style horse and carriage down an abandoned road saved from overgrowth only by the fact that it was so sandy near the harbor and that very little vegetation had managed to survived the darkened skies of Japan until now. She would be lucky not to break a wheel before she reached the base further inland.

She did have to admit that, even if it wasn't Bangkok (lucky Bookman) Japan wasn't quite the same godforsaken place she remembered. Klaud had only been there once, at the height of the war, and it was a relief to see that things had improved a little. Even if it was only by the virtue of Theodore's redemption complex and Chang's massive ego (of all the things she never thought she'd thank), she was grateful that there were sea birds instead of oppressive silence, that the air dared stir here now. There was still damage-- over a century of occupation by the Earl and so much concentrated despair and destruction by the akuma wasn't undone in twenty months, no matter how gifted an Exorcist-General Froi Theodore was and no matter how talented (and whole) his team-- and it was obvious in the dark sky and ill wind on the air, but things had begun to heal. The oppressive pall of death didn't overwhelm everything else any longer, which was a testament to how much they had done.

Finally, after perhaps an hour of driving through lands with no people to see how ridiculous the lady with the carriage and the monkey looked, she came upon the command center they'd set up. Things had gotten progressively quieter and quieter as she went further inland, the sea birds staying close to the water and no inland birds to fill the silence their absence left. All she could hear was the wind and the faint echo of a stray gull that realized it had gone too far into akuma territory by the time she reached the building. It was officially coded the Nagoya Chapterhouse of the Black Order, but it was one obviously makeshift structure that showed signs of being made more long-term but not permanent by any means. The transience meant that they planned to be gone soon, because Theodore could have made a much more solid structure with one word to his anti-akuma weapon. Or perhaps it didn't mean that-- this building was obviously meant to blend into the few local buildings still standing, tiled roof and sliding doors with rice paper panels rather than the stone and earth that would have been raised with the Maker of Eden. It could have been a gesture to tell the locals-- if there were any left-- that they were trying to help, trying to fit in. It was a Theodore sort of thing to do.

That, and he probably had been delighted at the prospect of designing the thing. Anything that let him take out his pencils instead of his weapon was a good thing to Theodore. Which was what he was doing at that very moment, actually, as he sat on the hard-packed earth in front of the building-- playing with pencils, that was, not designing a new chapterhouse. Or perhaps that's what he was doing; she was too far away to see what he was actually sketching out. This was what he did when there was a problem so urgent that he required assistance from another Exorcist-General rather than Bookman or Lotte and her sorry excuse for a team? Hell, they could have even teamed up Bookman and Lotte and gotten about the equivalent of a General and a half if they were that worried, but Chang had said that Theodore had requested either her or Walker. Whatever this was, two powerful Exorcists standing in for a General wasn't going to be good enough. ...that, or Theodore knew a hell of a lot more about Cross Marian's more heretical leanings than anyone gave him credit for and he thought that either the man's ex-lover or ex-apprentice would know something.

It could be that, she realized, and barely suppressed a shiver. This was Japan; there was no telling what the Earl had left lurking in dark corners, or what sorts of magic his supporters had dredged up from old books and forbidden experiments. The church had done enough horrific things itself-- she had done enough horrific things herself, both under Cross' tutelage and on her own-- that the darkest rituals the enemy had done in that direction could only be beyond mortal understanding. Perhaps if the old Bookman had been alive, Theodore would have called him, but she could understand-- if this was the case, and it was something he thought only Cross would know about on their side-- why he wouldn't want to initiate the new Bookman into such secrets just yet. He couldn't be much older than her team had been when they died, twenty or twenty-one years old. About the age she'd been when she saw what Cross could do and much older than Allen Walker would have been had he indeed been inducted into the same sort of magic, and that was far too young to see those things. And still older than he'd been when he realized he had the memories of a Noah and even blacker magic than Cross could have taught him lurking deep within his mind. The damage was already done with her and with Allen Walker, but there was still time yet for Bookman to think that a level-four akuma was the worst thing to be seen on heaven and earth.

"Froi," she said, reining her horse in and still wondering if Theodore knew what she carried in the trunk she sat on. "It's nice to know you called me in for something so serious you can sit around drawing-- what, have your apprentices gotten so tiresome you had to bring me here for a social call?" She was being facetious, of course, but she almost wouldn't have blamed him if that were the case. Being cooped up in a mostly-deserted war zone with Kanda and Han had to be a special sort of torture. Marie would have probably been all right, but almost two years with no personable company but for one person would have worn on her beyond belief.

"My students are my pride and joy, Klaud," Theodore said reprovingly, not looking up from what he drew. He had a way of chiding someone without actually coming out and saying the reprimand that must have come with his being a teacher for so long. "And this happens to be very relevant to why I asked Chief Chang to call you. I'm trying to recreate what I saw, to see if you recognize it."

Her heart sank. This wasn't going to be some simple (relatively speaking, of course) cleanup, and her secret was not nearly so well-kept as she had thought if Theodore thought she was going to be able to recognize things beyond his considerable field experience.

"I had hoped Allen Walker would be here," he went on as she dismounted-- leaving the trunk on the seat of the carriage, but not taking her eyes off it, half afraid that it would open up of its own accord even though she knew that was impossible. Lau Ji-Min leapt off the seat and onto her shoulder as she tied up the horse, Klaud listening to Theodore all the while. "Since with his memories of the Fourteenth, he would know more about what strange things the Earl left here. I can only hope that I was right about Cross teaching you some of what he knew before he died. Don't worry about the horse; this is more important. Chaoji!"

"What makes you think I'm any different from any of the other women in the Order he spent time with?" Klaud asked, as Chaoji Han emerged from that joke of a chapterhouse. "Careful, the horse is about as contrary as that Japanese charity case of yours." That made Chaoji snort outright, and Theodore gave him a look from under his glasses. He waited for Chaoji to take the horse behind the building before he spoke to her again.

"Because of your anti-akuma weapon," he said, with a nod to Lau Ji-Min. "You're the only person in the Black Order who isn't synchronized to your own Innocence." And right there he'd hit on the entire reason Cross had taken notice of her at all; she might have been beautiful enough to catch his eye once, a long time ago, but her face had been scarred before she ever came to the Order and met him. "Cross had to study for years to figure out how to do that, and you came to us with the natural ability to direct another Exorcist's weapon. I don't think it's a coincidence that you were the only student he ever taught who wasn't a parasitic accommodator." She'd been a prot g in his darker arts, not a potential future weapon the way Maria and Walker had been. "So, did he? Teach you, that is."

"Yes," Klaud said finally, reluctantly. "He did. Some of it, anyway."

"...do I want to know who's in your box, there?" Theodore asked, looking her in the eyes.

"No one who didn't know it was coming to him," Klaud said, and that seemed to satisfy whatever moral qualms had bothered Theodore enough that he asked. He nodded, and moved his eyes from hers and back to the paper he had been drawing on.

"That's what I thought," he said, voice brisk again. "Now, come and have a look at this, my dear General. It's not like anything we've seen in the Order archives, and while I sent a sketch to the previous Bookman some time ago, he passed away before he wrote a reply." And only Froi Theodore could sound so optimistic while talking about something he thought was worse than an akuma, honestly. Still, at least that meant whatever it was couldn't be too terrible, because Theodore wasn't Cross. He was optimistic, yes, but he wasn't facetious in the face of horror.

"And I take it this is something you wouldn't expect his successor to know of," she said, looking over his shoulder at the sketchpad. "...my God. I certainly hope the boy doesn't know about that."

Truthfully, Klaud didn't know what in God's name it was, either. The thing was curiously close to human, but not in any akuma stage she had ever seen before-- and not any form of reanimated corpse or converted akuma she had ever seen, either. It reminded her a little of a converted akuma in that the eyes were off, keeping it from a human appearance; except that they weren't black and soulless like the akuma Cross had taken control of. That was something Klaud had never picked up a knack for, nor did she want to-- even ignoring the fact it had been rendered obsolete by the recruitment of the boy who could take control of akuma by perfectly Vatican-approved methods. Evidently necromancy was all right so long as it was used in tandem with Innocence, because taking control of an akuma couldn't be called anything but that. They could have been normal eyes, but for the fact they were oddly large and looked in opposite directions. There was nothing about it to suggest that it was anything more than a person with most unfortunate facial deformity-- at least, nothing that she could name aloud as she looked. The wrongness about it was palpable, but she could not name a single thing about it that would stand up to scrutiny as less than human. It was subtle, but certainly there. And nothing about it could possibly be explained adequately via letter or golem; only a picture could really convey what there were no words in the collective human vocabulary for.

"I can't tell exactly what's wrong there," she admitted, fascinated despite herself. "If you asked me to write down anything that made me believe there was something strange there, I would not be able to tell you a thing. But there is something very, very wrong with that, and it's something that I haven't seen before. Not even in the books I got from Cross. You'll have to hope that General Walker knows more than I do, or that Bookman sent you a reply before the title passed down to his apprentice."

"Allen Walker is more needed to mediate with the Hierarch of Constantinople than he is by the effort in Japan, or so Malcolm Leverrier tells me. They've moved him from Russia to Turkey since I requested assistance-- I suspect they thought he needed a closer leash." And it was a testament to how hated by the Exorcists Malcolm Leverrier was that even Froi Theodore sounded bitter when he said the man's name; Theodore was the Biblical virtue of tolerance personified. He liked Kanda. "I was told most firmly that General Klaud would be sufficient for my needs, and that if you were not then the Operations Chief of Shanghai had been ceded the authority to have Bookman moved to Nagoya for a time."

Klaud would have paid good money to be in the same room when Bak Chang was told he'd been ceded the authority to do anything, particularly by the likes of Malcolm Leverrier; for such a tiny man, he could be awfully frightening when he wanted to be. Perhaps they could ask him to Nagoya for a time, lock him up with this strange thing Theodore had drawn, and then tell him that this thing had ceded him the authority to act in Japan. Their problem would be solved, because they would come back to find Chang had jury-rigged some sort of mechanical weapon out of rocks and telegraph cable and that it had annihilated the creature.

"Is something funny?" Theodore asked. She'd been smiling at the picture in her head despite herself.

"I was thinking that if we told Chang about Leverrier saying that, he'd be angry enough to come over here and solve our problem for us." Because it was our and us now, as much Klaud's mission as it was Theodore's. "Though now I really wish he'd let me bring a team out here with me; we could use Lotte on this one. Or even the rest of them, I've heard the Baron has something of a hobby interest in demonology." It would explain why he'd been living with an akuma for so long without dying; maybe she should have taken more of an interest in the man. Unless she planned to bequeath her knowledge on Allen Walker, she didn't have much other choice besides taking what she knew to the grave. And that would be a terrible idea, because things supposedly forbidden had a way of becoming crucially important once the last keepers of the secrets were dead. They had learned that lesson well in the last war, and next time it was unlikely they would be so lucky as to find the memories of the dead lurking in the minds of a living one of their own. The Fourteenth had been an incredible stroke of either luck or divine providence.

"Perhaps he would, at that," Theodore said, a smile breaking out on his face for the first time since she'd arrived. "But I've been remiss in my hospitality, General. Welcome to the Nagoya chapterhouse of the Asia Branch of the Black Order. I'm afraid it's not much, but rash displays of Innocence tend to frighten the few people who still live out here and so it's the best we could do." He packed up his sketches as he spoke, and then leaned in and lowered his voice. "Best not to mention what we discussed out here. Well-- you can tell Noise if you have to, because he'll have heard what we said out here and he would handle it the best besides. For God's sake, whatever you do, don't tell Yuu about any of it. I've had him chasing enough forbidden magic for one lifetime, and I won't have him adding what you do to his repertoire."

***

Theodore's warning actually made her contemplate just the opposite.

For all she didn't care for the boy and his temper, Yuu Kanda had obviously dabbled in some of the necromantic arts himself-- he had jumped right into the depths of them at fourteen or fifteen, marking himself with the curse to trade his later life for regeneration. That was black, black magic: the sort of spell that Cross would have cast in an out of the way cellar room and been careful to clean up after himself after it was done, had he been inclined to cast such a thing at all. For it to have worked as well as it had, he obviously had some natural talent in the area just as Klaud herself had. He'd come from Japan at the height of the akuma infestation, which meant that his family had to have some sort of power-- whether they were the Earl's supporters or not, they were using magic to keep themselves alive. It might have been in his service and it might have been to hide themselves, but it was there. Why, in God's name, hadn't Cross snapped him up, either at first or after he cursed himself? ...when she thought about it, it was probably because of Klaud. The two of them had joined the Order around the same time, and Klaud was a grown woman (albeit a young one) with a proven talent in an area Cross needed, while Kanda would have been a young child with a circumstantial claim to talent at best. And once he got the curse, he would have been impossible to pry away from Theodore. The old man would have held onto him to keep him from delving further into things he shouldn't have known.

And, had he decided now that he'd survived the war that dying sooner rather than later was no longer as attractive an option as it had seemed when it was all but inevitable, the prospect of learning to reverse the curse might appeal to him. If not, well, at least the decision not to pass the knowledge on would be on his head and not hers. Yes, training someone who would die within the decade as sure as she would might be the path of least destruction for her, and if it turned out any other way-- if he lived on, if he trained someone else-- then it was his damnation, not hers. She would fulfill her obligation to her teacher and save herself at the same time. The only obstacles would be the obstinacy of the boy (who was, so far as she could tell, going to be a nightmare of a student even if he was so eager to learn as Theodore thought) and Theodore himself, who would never allow such a thing. He'd have her shipped right back to Shanghai, mission or no mission.

His team was just as she remembered it from the height of the war: Marie who looked more like a mountain or a statue than a man right down to the white film over his eyes, Han who took every opportunity to insert himself into conversation (particularly with Klaud-- she had to give the man credit where it was due, he didn't let her scars make her different from any other woman in how he treated her for all that treatment was annoying), and Kanda who stayed in the back, silent but ludicrously ornamental. No wonder the place was so plain inside; the Kanda boy was all the decoration a room needed. ...perhaps not in the estimation of his teammates, though, because they kept trying to get him to join in the conversation in vain. They evidently didn't see the virtue of having him sit there with his mouth shut; if he kept to that habit, perhaps taking him as a student wouldn't be so bad as she thought.

"General Klaud didn't recognize it, either," Theodore was saying. Han sighed, Kanda made that dreadful disrespectful clicking sound with his tongue (oh, she hated that), and Marie didn't say anything at all. Marie was the bright one of that team, he really was. "But she agrees that there is something strange about it. General, Chaoji and I have both encountered these people before. He's the one who first noticed what was wrong with them."

"We're mostly the ones who talk to them, because Marie doesn't speak Japanese and they don't like Kanda very much," Han said. "I can't imagine why that is."

"You shut your mouth," Kanda said, actually rising to the stupid taunt. It didn't even make sense.

"They don't trust him because he left Japan," Theodore explained, stepping into the fight before it escalated. He'd have a lot of practice at that, with this team. "They're a bit strange about who they consider a foreigner here. But tell her about what you saw last week, when you went to the village to see if they saw any akuma."

"We go to the nearby villages-- the ones that have come out of hiding so far, anyway-- every few days, to make sure there are no akuma or strange disappearances, or anything strange that might mean they found a piece of Innocence. That kind of thing," Han said as prompted. So the sort of things that any Exorcist had done on call during the war, but concentrated in one small area. "This is the only part of Japan we've found a lot of people willing to come out and talk to us in. We think maybe because Nagoya had an Order presence a hundred years ago and some contact with China up until about twenty-five years ago, so it was easier to hide or get away. Some of the older people here have even met foreigners before-- we met a woman a couple of weeks ago who'd met General Theodore himself years ago."

"Get on with it," Kanda snapped.

"She spit on Kanda," Han said to her.

"Shut up," Kanda said, voice rising a little.

"Chaoji," Marie said warningly, his rumbling voice breaking into the conversation for the first time. "Drop it, or I'll tell her about the man who beat you into a pulp for talking to his sister last month."

"Man? He was twelve," Kanda said, the smirk that usually presaged something dire replacing his dark expression.

"I wasn't going to hit a child," Han protested, cheeks flushing with anger or humiliation or both.

"I would have," Kanda said. Surprise, surprise.

"That's because you're barbaric," Han said, the sudden air of superiority actually palpable across the table. Evidently that was the wrong thing to say, because Kanda stood up and left the room abruptly. Nobody called him back to the table, or said a word when the front door slid open and then shut.

"If you're going to act as childishly as he does, at least do it when we're not in the middle of telling General Klaud about the situation," Marie said, cocking an ear towards the door. "He's walking towards the beach. He'll be fine."

Klaud had seen this kind of bickering and bitter pettiness before; it was the taint of the land settling into them. They had all been here too long, the nastiness and decay of the Earl's leavings osmosing into their very bones and turning them sour (or more sour, in the case of Kanda) on one another. They needed a break, a few weeks or months in Shanghai to recuperate before they went back. Or better yet, to rotate with another team-- surely the Bookman spoke Japanese, and Walker might even be able to manage it if he thought very, very hard to what the Fourteenth might remember about his life. The Noah would have all been proficient in the language, wouldn't they? She didn't know it, but she could manage. If all else failed, she could call up someone who could translate for her, even if he wouldn't have appreciated being used for such a mundane purpose. It wasn't as if the dead got a say in what they were used for later, so it didn't matter.

"I'll go and get him, if you don't mind," Klaud said, standing up. "I'd like to hear from him what's gone on, since he's the only one of you with any idea of what used to pass for normal here. After he's told me what he knows, I'll be able to better judge what the rest of you have to say." It wasn't entirely a lie, and Theodore would hopefully believe it. She even looked him in the eye and nodded slightly, as if to say that she remembered what he'd warned her and that she would heed it.

Klaud had always been a very, very good liar, even before she met Cross Marian.

It was a fairly long walk to the beach, and Kanda wasn't an overly tall man; his stride wasn't that much longer than hers. She caught up to him before the road turned sandy again, and he turned around in a whirl of long black hair and longer black coat to face her.

"I was sick of listening to Han go on about nothing," she said, and he nodded once, sharply, the salute of an Exorcist to an Exorcist-General. "As you were. You can tell me what you know while we walk."

He nodded again, less symbolically this time, and they walked towards the beach. It had to be just past midday, because Klaud's ship had come in at midmorning and she'd spent several hours driving the carriage and talking to Theodore and attempting to talk to his team. At least, she thought it had been that long; it was hard to tell with the cloud cover so heavy. It gave everything an odd, gray twilight pall, as if the entire island of Honshu were caught between night and day still.

"He's right about some things," Kanda said finally, and those were words that Kanda didn't say often. "They don't like talking to me here. I'm a foreigner, too, and I could have actually helped it. Better to talk to a helpful foreigner than a traitor who ran away. Han and Theodore do most of the talking." He paused. "They say some strange things. They use a lot of words I don't know, that I don't think are entirely Japanese. They look and act strange, and there seem to be more of them coming out of hiding all the time. We can't tell where that hiding place is, though. We think it might be an island off the coast, between here and Korea, because so far as we can tell they just come out of the sea. Except we don't see any boats."

Disjointed as it was, it was the single longest speech she'd ever heard out of Theodore's silent, brooding subordinate. Perhaps it was so choppy because he wasn't used to delivering all his thoughts at once; someone who only spoke one thought at a time didn't need to transition well between thoughts or make them fluid and pleasant to follow. Sometimes, though, getting right to the point without pretty words or elaboration on tangents was just what was needed, and it was exactly what she hadn't been getting with the entire team bickering at one another. That disjointed, stilted report was the most concise thing she had heard since she and Theodore had been looking at that drawing earlier that morning.

It might have been a trick of the light, but Kanda looked paler and thinner than he had before the war ended. That was a perfectly natural reaction to have when spending the better part of two years in an akuma-polluted land without relief, but it was a reaction that the rest of his team-- the rest of his team who wouldn't have a tolerance from spending the first decade of their lives among it-- hadn't had. On the contrary, aside from their mental fog of bitterness they seemed perfectly healthy. It could have also been the mere fact that against the gray sky and his black hair and coat-- because even in late spring as it was the weather stayed cool and foul and dry, winds and thunder and clouds with no rain thanks to the damage the akuma had wreaked on the balance of the weather-- his skin looked paler than it would have under ordinary circumstances.

"What did you really want?" Kanda asked finally, after a good half-hour of walking in silence towards the beach. "What you couldn't get from Han and Theodore?"

"I think you know it's more what I couldn't ask in front of them, since you waited until we were far enough away for Marie not to hear before you asked about it." Klaud said. The ground was sandy under their feet and she could hear the water off in the distance, but she couldn't see it yet. "Let's wait until we get to the beach. I want to make sure we aren't overheard. Besides, I think Lau Ji-Min is getting restless." That part was true; normally her monkey was impeccably behaved, but now he was pulling at her hair and fidgeting on her shoulder. "I'll let him run about the beach when we get there; nobody will be there. Chang's people all left like their boat was on fire."

It was another half an hour until they reached the water, which was not terribly slower than taking the horse and carriage because the ground wasn't particularly passable here. Walking in silence didn't seem to bother him and it certainly didn't rattle her; it let her decide exactly how she was going to phrase things so she didn't get a fist in the face. She didn't have any illusions that Kanda wouldn't hit a woman-- or at least, not a woman as well-armed and able to defend herself as Klaud Nine, just like he'd have hit a twelve year old big and strong enough to give Han a sound beating.

"Did General Cross know why you couldn't die?" Klaud asked as soon as Lau Ji-Min jumped off her shoulder and ran to the surf, not wasting any time because in the end there probably wasn't anything she could say to soften it. Kanda looked like he indeed wanted to punch her in the jaw, but didn't dare because she was an Exorcist-General. Whatever other faults he had, insubordination was not generally one of them when it involved something more serious than leaving the table while Theodore was attempting to bring Klaud up to speed. "Because I do. And so does Theodore. He doesn't want me talking about this to you, because he thinks you're going to run off chasing more black magic like you did years ago. Where did you even find a necromancer willing to teach a fifteen year old boy to curse himself like you did? I don't think even Cross would have gone that far."

There was a moment of silence between them, Kanda staring at her like she'd grown a second head right before his eyes and he had the irresistible urge to remove both heads.

"...India," he finally said, spitting out the single word like she had forced it out of him.

"Kali?" She asked, raising an eyebrow at him. Klaud knew how grotesque that expression made her look, contorting the scar across her face, and that was of course why she consciously chose to do it. The only easy way to get through to someone like Kanda was intimidation, like calling to like. "That's not a sect I studied very much. Cross was fonder of Set."

"I don't like snakes," Kanda said, as if that explained everything about his choice in gods of death and black magic. It was as good a criterion as any, she supposed, if one had to choose at all.

"I don't mind them," she said. "Though I always liked Cybele better. At least you didn't go for Hel. That's what I'd have pegged you, all that stupid pride." He bristled, hackles going up at her words. Good that meant she was getting under his skin, and the more she baited him and the more he rose to it the less likely he was to tell anyone about this out of sheer pride. "Kali, I think I can work with."

"Work with?" He asked, and then clicked his tongue derisively. "I already have a General."

"A General who didn't want me to talk to you because he knew how your parents managed to stay alive in Japan," Klaud pointed out. "And because you're so obssessed with something that you went out and made a bargain with Kali. You're a baby who's not done anything except to himself, but baby or not you've used some damn black necromancy. Theodore wanting to pretend you haven't doesn't change it."

"I'm not like Cross, carrying around a corpse," Kanda said, looking out at the water instead of at her. "Don't you dare compare me to that fool."

"You are the corpse, boy," Klaud said, voice sharper than she'd intended. "How many times have you died? There are five on the record, but there have to be more. How many times did you pick yourself back up on the ark after that Noah electrocuted you? How many missions did you get yourself gutted on without Allen Walker to report your injuries to Chief Lee? How many times did Bookman or Theodore or someone else cover for you? You've been on almost a decade of borrowed time, and you'd damn well better not forget it. You know, I thought you looked pale, but I told myself it was just a trick of the light here. I'm not so sure it is now. Is Kali finally coming to collect?"

It was going too far, and she knew it was when she said it. But the thought of someone denying what he had done when it was so obvious-- when so many other Exorcists had died, including her team, when he'd survived all their deaths put together and more-- was too much for her, and she had a tendency to let her emotions get the better of her. Winters had always mocked her for it, that bastard. And maybe he'd been right to, because Kanda got right up into her face with his eyes big and angry and his color higher than it had been the entire time she'd been there.

"Don't you say that," he hissed at her. "Don't you dare. I'm not dying, I can't die until everything is finished. You're all wrong."

"They know," Klaud said, realization coming down on her all at once. "They know you're dying. That's why they both jump on Han for being childish but not you. Let the dying man have his tantrum, he can't help it and he'll be gone soon anyway, is that it?"

"No." He'd gone pale again, spooked instead of angry. A frightened Yuu Kanda was not something many people could live to say they saw, but now Klaud was one of that privileged, powerful few who had well and truly rattled him beyond his superficial temper. "I swore I wasn't going to die in Japan, and I'm not going to. Take your lies somewhere else."

"If I was lying, you wouldn't be afraid," she said, not taunting now. No, not taunting at all-- now it was a calculated onslaught, aimed right at the cracks in his walls. She was angry at him, angry that he'd gotten a chance others deserved more and now he wouldn't answer for that fact and pay back the favor he had gotten. And she still needed him, however much she thought he wasn't worth it now. That part made her angriest of all. "I'm not saying this to upset you." Liar, liar. "Consider it a mission from an Exorcist-General that runs concurrent to your assignment with Theodore. Cross made sure that what he knew didn't all die with him, and now I'm going to do the same. Better to pass it on to someone who's already damned himself than to an innocent."

He drew in a deep breath, as if to shout at her, but when he opened his mouth he was looking over her shoulder and he called out something in Japanese.

***

She knew exactly what she was talking about, and that was what really bothered him. She had guessed things no one should have been able to guess, things that not even people he worked with for years had any idea of, all because of what she and General Cross had gotten up to. Oh, there had been rumors, so many that had Cross actually ever been at Headquarters at the same time Kanda was he would have gone and asked him what he'd had to find for himself in India. That had been before the tattoo and lotus, before Theodore had realized what his apprentice was willing to do to accomplish his goals. But Kanda had only half believed those rumors, because nobody with that much power would train someone like Allen Walker (and even after the war and grudgingly giving up the nickname beansprout only because Walker had grown into a respectably European height, he still wasn't anything approaching fond of the man) voluntarily. And certainly nobody with that much power would be such a wine-soaked degenerate. At least, that's what he'd thought back then; if he'd known about the Fourteenth then, he might have believed the rumors fully.

If seeing Maria in Edo hadn't convinced him they were true, the things Klaud knew now would have done the job. Perhaps the things he had learned were the reason Cross Marian was a wine-soaked degenerate.

"If you don't, it would have to be Walker or the Bookman," she was saying. "Actually, the Bookman might be a better choice. At least then I'd never have to worry about the knowledge dying out right before it's needed." And he had been about to say that of course the old man wouldn't put up with such nonsense from her, but then he remembered that they had received word of Bookman's death some time ago and that meant the Order's village idiot was the new Bookman. Before he could tell her that not even that moron would listen to her, though, something behind her caught his eye.

He was a local, dressed in dark, rough clothing like they all wore. They had been hard to see at first when everything was so much darker, but as the akuma were killed and the land bled out their taint the sky had lightened and dark browns and grays were less camouflaging than they had been when the people of Nagoya started wearing them. And that was strange, because the locals never disturbed the beach that the Exorcists kept their makeshift port on-- at first they'd had vandalism, destroyed boats and smashed piers, but after the Earl's supporters in the region were largely ferreted out and dealt with and the rogue akuma destroyed that had stopped. The locals here-- even the strange, wrong ones they couldn't figure out-- left their beach and their chapterhouse alone.

"You, there," Kanda called out in Japanese. "What are you doing there?"

The man froze where he stood, staring him down instead of running away. His eyes both looked in the same direction, not opposite ones, and there was no air of anything wrong about him.

"You don't have a Chinese accent," he said, taking a tentative step forward.

"No," Kanda agreed flatly. "I don't." That was always the moment things fell apart, when they realized he didn't speak with an accent and that he was a traitor and a coward.

"You need to leave," he said, voice warning and not threatening. Kanda knew threats when he heard them; he was, after all, something of an expert in making them. "You need to leave right now. Go back to the other Exorcists, get back on your boat to China."

"We aren't leaving," Kanda said, stepping away from General Klaud-- who had long since turned around to see the man taking another step and then another towards them-- and crossing his arms. "We have a job to do here."

"You can't stop them," he said, looking down one end of the beach and then the other. It was a gesture eerily akin to when Marie turned his head to listen in different directions, as if he were sensing something with something other than his eyes. "They're not akuma. They're worse, and no one will believe we made a deal with something worse to escape the akuma. Leave."

"I'm not that easy to kill," he said, feeling the smirk rising to his lips involuntarily. Finally, something to do besides sit and write reports about how there had been no akuma because he couldn't go round to the villages, something to do besides hear Marie bitch and moan about how Kanda wasn't breathing properly, that there was some rasp there no one else could hear. There was another thing Klaud shouldn't have known but did-- but this wasn't the time to think about that. "And I've killed things much worse than akuma." How many times did you get up after that Noah electrocuted you? No, he'd sworn not to think about that while there were more important things, and this was one of the very few things he'd come across since their first few weeks here that was more important.

"They're worse than the akuma, worse than the sons of Noah," he said, clearly growing more desperate. It sounded strange in Japanese, Noa-a, especially when he was used to hearing it in English and French and all the other languages the Order used. It was a word that stayed the same in every language, Noah. Like akuma, or Innocence. "They're coming to this beach tonight. You need to leave here before they get here, Exorcist."

"Why are you warning us?" Kanda asked the obvious question, while Klaud looked back and forth between them in obvious irritation. What she must have understood would have been alarming-- a long string of things she didn't understand interspersed with Exorcist, akuma, akuma, akuma, akuma, Noah, Exorcist. It must have sounded like a sighting to her.

"Not everyone here is one of them," he said. "But we will be soon. Japan is lost to you, to everyone. Save yourself, Exorcist. When this is done you'll be the only thing left of Japan. He is coming."

Then he turned and ran away. It was the most consideration anyone had ever shown him since they'd landed in this terrible country he'd have been better off leaving behind forever, and the warning had been given to him, not to Theodore or Han or Marie. You don't have a Chinese accent with no derisive comment following that, no jeering, no accusations of gaijin. He'd actually been Japanese again, for two whole minutes. The only thing left of Japan.

"What the hell was that?" Klaud asked, quietly.

"We're going back to the chapterhouse," Kanda said, hand going to Mugen. "Get your monkey. We're going. That was a warning, and Theodore needs to hear it."

They went about halfway back in silence-- it wouldn't do to alert anyone lurking along the way that they knew if they hadn't heard the tableau on the beach (and unless they somehow had the hearing of Marie, they hadn't). At that halfway point, though, Kanda started whispering. Marie, Marie, Marie. Get Theodore and Han. There's trouble. It was a trick their team had-- they could communicate over considerable distance without the wireless, albeit only one way. Deesha had actually perfected it, back when they were still kids doing training missions; they had calculated exactly how far away they could be from Marie and still be heard when they spoke softly, how far a whisper would carry, and kept up with the calculations as Marie got more powerful and more proficient with his weapon. It had come on handy more times than he could count here, in a place where the golems broke down at an alarming rate because the lingering evil of the akuma degraded them just like it did everything else.

Marie, Han, and Theodore were waiting for them when they got back.

"There was someone on the beach," Kanda said as soon as they were inside the door and it slid shut behind them. "Our beach, the one no one touches now. He warned us to leave."

"An Earl supporter?" Han guessed immediately, and Kanda clicked his tongue in wordless derision. It was almost a reflexive response when Han opened his mouth by now, but this time it was actually warranted; he would have realized that wasn't the case if he had half a brain.

"He talked to me in Japanese," Kanda elaborated. "He called me Japanese. He said this place was lost, that the Exorcists should save themselves because the people here have made a deal with something worse than akuma to survive. That they were going to meet on our beach tonight, and that we should leave before they do. Then he said I had to save myself and leave to save one person from Japan because it was lost to everyone else."

"Have you got wireless here?" Klaud asked as soon as he'd finished. "They've taken down a lot of the towers over in Europe, but I would imagine Chang pays to keep them up here."

"We have it, but it's not very good," Marie admitted. "We could probably get a message through to Shanghai, but that's about it. The transmitters in other cities-- he's got them all over the place, up and down the coast from Vladivostok to Bangkok-- aren't strong enough to reach us here."

"Bangkok?" She echoed. "Is Bookman still lazing around Indochina and pretending to work?"

"I have no idea," Theodore said, thoughtfully. "But if he is, then Chief Chang could relay a message from us to him. If that's what you have in mind."

"Have one of you run the wireless and ask Chang what's worse than an akuma, and tell him we need to have Bookman find out very, very quickly."


	2. Chapter 2

_A brief note_: I had not originally intended to post any more of this, despite having more written for a multitude of reasons (it is absolutely AU now because it was written before the Alma arc, it is full of the skeevy cultural issues that go hand in hand with Lovecraft, nobody here actually seemed to be reading, and the hassle that goes into posting here), but since I got a review asking for more I'm (at the very least) putting up what I have, and may write more after all.

* * *

_Siam Riep, Thailand_

_May 186X_

Bookman got his next transmission from Shanghai in the middle of the afternoon, right after tea. English tea was one custom he'd picked up in the Order and never really broken himself of- not the rubbish black variety itself, but the meal in the middle of the afternoon that consisted almost entirely of things the old man hadn't wanted him to eat. It was mostly the fact that it was right after tea and that he was feeling exceptionally good-natured and lazy that he answered the wireless transmission at all; a truly staggering number of people associated with the order had mysterious bouts of equipment failure when Bak Chang called them. The truly _strange_ part was how the Shanghai technicians could find absolutely nothing wrong with those selfsame systems when they performed routine maintenance. It was one of the great mysteries of the Vatican, truly.

"This is Bookman," he said, laziness stretching his words out into a drawl as he laid back over the settee with an arm thrown over his eyes, as if Bak could see his little gestures of annoyance over the wireless. "What is it?"

"There's a mission for you," Bak said, all business for once in his life; that alone made Bookman sit up and stop trying to nap through the transmission. This was definitely not the usual posing and spurious status checking, and he wondered for just one instant just how much of a coincidence his answering that transmission had been. He didn't like believing that things were laid out in advance, but the old man had been a big believer in prophecy. _This_ Bookman didn't believe anything was laid down until it happened and he put it down, but old lessons were hard to shake in the face of a certain class of coincidence. "Have you got access to a good library there, or have all the books long since disintegrated in the jungle?"

"One of the best," he said. The accumulated collection of Angkor Wat was third only to Alexandria and Constantinople, superior to any forgotten vault beneath the Vatican by far. He was fairly certain that it wasn't (strictly speaking, at least) permitted for anyone to remove things from any of those collections, not even a Bookman, but if the Bookmen didn't want their far-removed successors removing things from their collections then perhaps they shouldn't have left said libraries abandoned to rot in the head and the rain. He had what he'd originally planned to be a small collection from Angkor Wat, but it seemed to inexplicably grow every time he visited the hidden library. Strange, that.

"What," Bak asked, "could possibly be worse than the akuma or the Noah?"

"Not much," Bookman said, standing up with an audible clink. Perhaps he should have worn less jewelry. "A more powerful akuma, or the Earl himself. Or it could be a rogue exorcist or wild piece of Innocence causing problems, which is obviously much more likely."

"Are you breaking glasses over there?" Bak asked when the bracelets jangled against one another again, but let it go. "I have an urgent request from Exorcist-Generals Klaud and Theodore. They're both stationed in Nagoya, and they claim to be dealing with something completely unknown to either of them. Theodore sent a drawing of whatever it was they found and a request for help to your predecessor shortly before his death, and never received a reply. Other than that, I can only give you a verbal account of what they know- it doesn't match anything in our records, or in Dr. Epstein's. I need your expertise, and that library in your head, in Japan."

"I'm pretty sure you can't do that," Bookman protested, but he was already walking down the steps to the cool, stone-walled cellar underneath the house. It had to be stone, to keep the damp out where earthen walls wouldn't. It was the entire reason he had chosen this building, because he could protect the library here. In fact, he suspected that some long-forgotten previous Bookman had probably had this place built in the first place, to keep books dry- it was, after all, otherwise a completely illogical structure to have in a part of the world with a monsoon season, because it required so much effort to keep from flooding. The golem followed him, wings fluttering so softly that Bak's voice drowned them out.

"Oh, but I can," Bak said, and Bookman could hear that obnoxious, almost perpetually present smugness get even worse. "You're officially under Asia Branch jurisdiction, because Rome doesn't want to deal with the baggage your other order brings now that the war is over. Either you surrender your weapon and leave the Order- which I wouldn't advise, from what I've heard about what happens to accommodators who separate from their Innocence for too long- or you bring your research to Shanghai and you get on the boat I'm sending you to Nagoya in."

The sad thing was that if he hadn't been so unbearably smug Bak would have been a good leader. He knew exactly when to stop playing the part of the brat who bought his way to the top of the heap and apply the real pressure, which was to say, exactly at the moment he'd done it here. Very few people could push a Bookman around, and Bak Chang had just proven himself one of them. Bookman was starting to understand why the old man had been so reluctant to join the Order and probably wouldn't have done so at all if he could have helped synchronizing with his Innocence. It made for a bond that was hellishly hard to shake, and that was something a Bookman shouldn't have.

At least the Order would be all but gone by the time this Bookman chose an apprentice of his own, though it might hang on in Asia until whatever still lurked in Japan was completely taken care of and there would probably always be a motherhouse in Rome. It would sit echoing empty around Hevlaska, forgotten by everyone but the Bookmen, but this Bookman wasn't going to keep up the association between the two orders beyond his own obligations.

Which were to Exorcist-General Allen Walker and not to Asia Branch Chief of Operations Bak Chang so far as he was concerned, but that was apparently beside the point.

"Understood, Chief Chang," he said, with a formality he very rarely displayed even now that he was Bookman. There was always one thing about a man that persisted in all his personalities no matter how good an actor a Bookman or his apprentice was; Bookman's was his lack of formality, whether it was laid-back, friendly, or rude (because he had been all three, many, many times over). His master's had been his never-ending crankiness, or so it sometimes had seemed to his apprentice. "What exactly, pray tell, am I supposed to be researching? There's not exactly a volume here labeled _things that are worse than akuma_." Not that he would have objected to the challenge of finding that without clearer direction, of course— it was just that if there really was something worse than an akuma out there, Bookman probably didn't have the leisure time to head for a better-appointed library and make that search. That was a topic to pursue in Alexandria or Rome or Oxford, not in the mouldering remains of books abandoned years ago in the jungles of Thailand and Cambodia.

"From what General Theodore tells me, it's something powerful enough that the people living in and around what's left of Nagoya City made a bargain with it to protect them from akuma. Since these people are alive at all, it obviously must be something with the power to hold up its end of such a trade. If this is merely a belief in some local god, these people are the luckiest men in creation."

"And coincidences like that don't happen," Bookman agreed. "At least, not to people so accursed as the ones who didn't make it out of Japan. Could it be a powerful akuma that went rogue? We've seen it before, and not just in the ones General Cross converted. They have turned on one another, and some of them do keep herds when it suits their purposes. It could have been a level three akuma defending its food source from the others."

"Innocence appears to have no special effect on them, if you would let me _finish_," Bak said, that I'm-better-than-a-Bookman-and-I'll-prove-it impatience back in his voice, making his words tumble out so fast they almost fell over one another. "They're just like any other human to an anti-akuma weapon. Which is more than sufficient to dispatch them, obviously, but they are not akuma. And there has been no sign of anything not appearing in a human skin, whether it's an akuma or otherwise."

That would have more of an effect on some Exorcists than others, and which ones worked and which ones failed seemed to have no real rhyme or reason. Yuu could stab a man to death with his sword, but Allen's would go right through an ordinary human as if he were a ghost. And so on and so forth- small blessings that Theodore's team consisted of people whose weapons all worked both ways. Besides General Klaud, that was, but she was one of the few Exorcists trained in handling a weapon besides her Innocence. That was the price of having an anti-akuma weapon with a mind of its own, he supposed, that she would have to take her chances without it at some point.

"So far they haven't done anything to antagonize the team, but their behavior has been erratic and all of the team members say there's something off about them they can't quite place. Including Kanda, which would seem to preclude any ignorance of Japanese custom causing the confusion. And just today an apparent defector warned them that there would be some sort of meeting at the harbor the team has set up tonight and that the team should avoid it at all costs. I thought it prudent to get the contents of the message to you as quickly as possible, in case it had some other meaning that would be evident when you figure out what they are dealing with." Bak didn't sound smug anymore; quite to the contrary, he sounded frustrated with their lack of knowledge. That, at least, was a state Bookman could sympathize with.

"Ahhh, a midnight sabbat," Bookman said, only half jestingly. It sounded silly, but that could actually help point him in the right direction. Secret meetings at midnight, fires on the shoreline— that sounded western, which meant it probably wasn't a local cult. "I wonder if being by the sea is simply incidental. It's usually not, but they can't really help it in a place like Japan."

"You're the one who would know," Bak said, downright _pleasant_ now that he'd gotten his own way and he knew it. "Wire back when you've got enough for me to report back to General Theodore. _I'll_ have my receiver turned on, unlike the rest of you."

Then the transmission cut out and the only sounds around him were the soft snick-snick of the golem's tiny mechanical wings and the _clink-clink-clang_ as bracelets of varying weights settled on his wrists with every movement. Bookman didn't like silence in the library, unlike his predecessor, and so he wore the bangles to break it. ...that, and gleefully irritating people was one of those qualities that, like his casual manner, he hadn't quite made up for a persona. And irritate people those bracelets _did_. Nobody could ignore Bookman when he was making noise with every movement.

Right off the cuff, he could think of half a dozen Chinese or Japanese gods that were little better than regional, and probably didn't have much in the way of real power even if one were given to believe in the polytheistic. The problem with dismissing them outright for their probably weakness was that people in isolated, akuma-infested Japan weren't exactly in a position for exposure to anything farther afield, except perhaps some ancient and esoteric form of Hinduism. Except in a few cities where foreigners had come to trade, that was, where the Portuguese and the Dutch had been stopping for centuries and the Jesuits had built enclaves. If the Black Order could slip into the ports at Nagoya and Nagasaki over the centuries, there was no telling what else could have come in.

And they were in _Nagoya_. He would have to examine everything, because these people would be as ecumenical as any Japanese survivor could be. Actually, if this was as isolated as it sounded like to Bookman (it had been almost two years and Theodore had just now noticed something amiss? It was either new or contained to a small area they had just reached) then he might be better off examining the stranger things _first_. Something native would have spread further and faster; word would have gotten round about a well-loved god who suddenly protected his people from akuma. A foreign cult would have spread more slowly, a creeping protection most people would have dismissed or refused.

A _powerful_ foreign cult, because something strong enough to contend with the high-level akuma in Japan wasn't some kitchen god or ancestral spirit. He was going to have to look at the better-known esoteric faiths, but probably not any of the major deities of a region. At least, not major deities that had reigned in the past few thousand years. Demons, Assyrian and Mesopotamian gods, Greek mystery cults, they were possibilities- the deities people had once paid lip service to but now only read about as literature and curiosity. None of the modern western religions' more esoteric and mystic practices had one bit of effect on akuma, and it was discouragingly difficult to bend the eastern ones into doing blasphemies. No, it had to be something old that had died out, some cult devoted to a god that wasn't a god at all but a monster. Gods didn't generally intervene on behalf of people when the Earl was involved; some more earthly monsters might.

And that wasn't even taking into account the fact that Bak wouldn't have called Bookman for advice had he thought some forbidden branch of a modern religion was involved. Bak Chang knew more about that sort of thing than almost anyone else in the Order- Renee Epstein and Cross Marian might known more, and Cross was dead and Bak refused to work with Epstein anymore if he could help it. He would have turned to his own library and given Theodore his own advice without ever calling anyone else. No, Bookman had to assume that Bak had already considered and discarded black magic. In fact, given the Order business Bak had covered up in the past, it had probably been the _first_ explanation to occur to the man.

An alternate and perhaps more likely explanation was that it was a person with Innocence. Newly-synchronized accommodators could do some truly bizarre things; Crowley had been mistaken for a monster by his own people, after all. It could even turn more sinister; Bookman hadn't been there, but he'd heard from Allen and Yuu about when they'd found Timothy. If this was something similar that could control or frighten people, that would explain the devotion and fear it inspired among different people and how it kept akuma at bay. Miranda had been powerful enough to help stop Rhode Camelot even untrained, and Crowley had been killing akuma for quite some time before the Order found him. A rogue Exorcist who didn't know what he was and was abusing the power fit so well that he was sure that was the answer now that the notion was seriously in his head. Not that he was going to stop researching other avenues, of course, because a Bookman who got complacent was a Bookman who got wrong.

"Abaddon, Baphomet, Cybele," Bookman murmured, half to himself and half to the golem that would record what he was saying. That had been a bit of his own ingenuity, a moment of I'm-smarter-than-Bak-Chang that he couldn't help as a little bit of personal retaliation. It saved him a lot of time, repetition, and wrist pain in the long run, being able to record his thoughts aloud and play them back as needed. It would have probably given the old man a conniption fit, either because of the perceived laziness or the potential for the information to fall into the wrong hands, but the old man wasn't around and he wasn't right about everything. "Why am I even trying to make a list yet? There's no way I can go through every single minor little god or mythical monster that might actually exist, trying to find the one Bak thinks I need." He needed more _information_.

So he did something even faster than consulting his own memory: he began skimming through the books, in alphabetical order by author. _An Abridged Edition of the Writings of Abdul Al-Hazred_ was one of the first volumes on the shelf, and that struck him as odd because Bookmen did not keep abridged editions of anything. If it was worth having, it was worth having in full. Either this was so rare and precious that even an abridged version was hard to come by, or it had been put in the library in error. So he picked it up and took it with the books he was actually planning to skim through, because he could peruse it later and decide whether it would stay or go.

* * *

"Bookman," Chief Chang told Marie over the wireless golem, the transmission so staticky that Klaud could barely understand him, "has come to the stunning conclusion that you have a rogue Exorcist on your hands who doesn't realize he's using Innocence, because Bookman is a moron."

"Tell us something we don't know already," she thought she heard Kanda mutter in the back of the room. Had he always been that mouthy? She remembered him just staying quiet most of the time, when Allen Walker and the younger Bookman weren't haranguing him. Then again, she hadn't been around Theodore's kids that much, and he _did_ have a reputation.

"Fine, how about the fact that the man is going to be in Nagoya in a month's time, or less if he stops being contrary and speeds up the voyage?"_That_ was unexpected, because what good was the Bookman going to be without his library? They might as well have sent for Crowley and the boy_without_ Lotte to keep them marginally competent; they would be of more use.

"If they haven't driven us from the place by then," Chaoji said darkly. He'd been in a nervous temper ever since Marie had announced that he could hear something going on at the beach, but it was too faint to make out. That had been perhaps an hour earlier, and she had spent most of that hour outside of the chapterhouse to avoid the unease his mood left in the room. Not that she could blame him, really; of them all, Marie was one of the hardest to rattle. Such a vague warning from him seemed to be dire, indeed.

"They aren't going to do that," Theodore said, the firm words of someone used to dealing with high-strung young men who needed to be turned to a calmer bent. "We'll be here when Bookman arrives, and he can see for himself what we're dealing with."

Klaud wasn't sure what to make of what she'd seen and heard on the beach. The man there definitely hadn't looked like the picture Theodore had shown her upon her arrival, and he'd certainly sounded frightened even to her uncomprehending ears. And whatever he'd said- because it had to be more than just the perfunctory summary Kanda had given- had spooked Kanda almost as much as her own speech to him had. And unless that man was actually rattling off a necromantic curse to loop one's life force and how to reverse it, they weren't scaring him for the same reasons. Whatever that man had warned them against, it wasn't something she wanted to meet after sundown on a deserted beach with no preparation or advance knowledge.

They stayed on the defensive that night and the nights that followed, taking watch in the chapterhouse in shifts and keeping as alert as possible during the day. There was no sign of any destruction on the beach in the morning- no planks ripped from the dock, and the small boat lashed there was fine. The carriage Klaud had brought with her stood behind the ersatz chapterhouse in the same condition she'd left it in, and the horse seemed just fine, if a bit frightened. That was a good word for all of them over the next month and a half: just fine, if a bit frightened. The lack of sleep thanks to watch shifts and nervousness was starting to take its toll on all of them, even unshakable Marie and inscrutable Kanda- especially Kanda, who'd taken a fever and started coughing. But they couldn't afford to take him off duty for something that wasn't debilitating, and so he went out and patrolled with the rest of them.

"Not this again," Chaoji said, with Kanda on the other side of the beach with Marie and out of earshot of the three of them unless the other Exorcist told him what they said. Chaoji sounded worried about his teammate, not annoyed with him; that was a change. "I thought he got over that."

"I had hoped he did," Theodore said, with a sigh. "But I'm beginning to think it's something he won't ever get over, not really."

She'd been right. Theodore knew.

"He's got consumption," she said, surprised despite herself. "That's the only thing I've ever heard of that goes away and comes back by turns. Besides the ague, anyway, and he obviously doesn't have that."

"I'd suspected," Theodore confirmed with a small nod. His eyes were faraway, looking out over the horizon. "We all did. But we hoped we were wrong. His curse is finally undoing, and I suppose that's the form his death chose to take. I just wish it hadn't chosen such a lengthy death for him."

"That's what curses do," Klaud said, the lie falling glibly from her tongue. Curses like that didn't pick the death, that was just stupid. But let Theodore think she disapproved. He would believe what he wanted to believe, especially in regards to his dying apprentice. "Take the worst form possible."

"That's all black magic, not just curses," Theodore said, tilting his head slightly to the right as if he were straining to see something on the horizon. "I know you didn't listen to me, General, and there's nothing I can do about that. I can only hope I've taught Yuu well enough to resist temptation."

It was easy to forget- with the glasses and the crying and the overwhelming need to save people- that Froi Theodore was a wily old bastard. He'd probably known all along that she planned to talk to his apprentice about switching Generals. And it was easy to forget- with the snarling and hissing and the overwhelming need to be _alone_- that Yuu Kanda had been with Theodore for most of his life, and owed the man said life more times over than Klaud cared to count. If Theodore had warned him so harshly against it, she would just have to wait for death to scare him more before asking again.

* * *

There was no sign of the sunset meeting they all knew had taken place just as it did every night. Every inch of the beach was pristine, from the water to the pier to where the sand bled into the death-choked scrub. No blood, nothing left behind, no sign of fire or flood or any people on the sand. The wind might have scrubbed that last away, except that the air around was dead still for the first time since they had arrived. There was always a cold wind scouring the harbor and everywhere else on the island, and this was the first time in twenty months it had been still. It was as if the lingering taint of the akuma sought to die for a day as if to prove that no one had met on the beach, so that they wouldn't erase the proof that no one in any cult had the power to stand up to them. Kanda would believe that of the akuma.

"Kanda," Marie said, "I think there's someone over there."

Kanda looked where he was told, because Marie was one of the few people who almost always knew what he was doing and was worth listening to. He wouldn't go off hearing phantoms and thinking he heard something around every corner. If he said someone was there, something or someone was there.

And sure enough, that someone stood a few dozen yards behind them. It was hard to tell with the distance, but he thought she was a woman- one of only a few any of them had seen since setting up camp in Nagoya. Most of the survivors they'd found were men, with a scattering of women and even fewer children, and none of the ones they had seen lurking about with strange airs had been women at all. Nor children, for that matter- only men in their prime. It had been much the same when he was a child, the normal distribution of survivors in hiding rather than a sign of something more sinister at work; a man in his best physical condition was logically the most likely person to outrun an akuma and make it to the questionable safety of the next hiding place. The problem with that was that logic tended not to be involved in situations like this. Particularly ones with unknown denominators that might have been monsters as hideous to behold as the Earl himself.

Kanda hadn't quite believed his ears when he heard that theory. It was the only alternate theory Bookman had given Bak to his preferred answer of a rogue Exorcist, and if he'd been there in person Kanda would have probably throttled him. None of them really understood, not a single one of them- they'd all spent their lives fighting the Earl and none of them understood what akuma could really do to a place, do to people. They saw the shadow of it here while they cleaned up after smaller incidents as best they could, and Theodore had seen a small measure of the horror during the months he spent in Nagoya trying to ferry people out of Japan before that became impossible, but not a one of them had sat huddled in a long-abandoned house or a brush pile or a cove on the sand with his mother's hand pressed over his mouth to keep him from making a sound. No, Kanda had seen firsthand more real horror by the time he was nine years old than any of the rest of them had during the entire war, and he knew that there was nothing out there to equal what had been done here. There couldn't be, or there wouldn't be any heaven or earth left for anyone, so much would be the destruction. For the sake of everyone there could only be one earthly being of the likes of the Earl of the Millennium.

"Hello, there!" She called out to them, voice making it obvious she was indeed a woman, and gave them the jauntiest wave he'd ever seen from anyone in Japan either both before he'd left or after he'd returned. She spoke in Japanese, obviously, and Kanda realized suddenly that with Marie so far down the beach from him and without his coat, he must have looked like one of them. As he walked closer and so did she, he could see that she was young, maybe around his age. Her dark hair was cut short around her face, and he remembered that, too: his mother cutting off all of her hair when they couldn't hide in one place anymore and had to run. A long tail of hair was something that an akuma or a traitor could grab onto in a chase; that was most of the reason he wore his hair so defiantly long even now, _let them try to take hold of him_.

When he didn't answer her immediately, she stopped waving.

"You are the one who speaks Japanese, aren't you?" She asked, and she sounded a little uncertain.

Clearly she _didn't_ think he was one of them. He was an idiot for thinking he could ever fit in; of course they'd be able to tell. Kanda's father had been able to tell when a man had been in hiding and when he was a traitor pretending so people would reveal their hiding places, and so could most of the other adults he'd been around as a child. It was a necessary skill for survival in the Earl's Japan; placing the stride and clothing of a foreigner- and the long hair, of course, because no one in Japan would wear such a blatant taunt the way an Exorcist would- would be easy for her.

"Yes," Kanda said, suddenly connecting that she couldn't be from the people who spoke to Theodore and Chaoji or she would know there was more than one man in the expedition who spoke her language. She must have been from the same place as the man who'd warned him, the one who'd only seen Kanda and General Klaud and thus could neatly divide the Exorcists he knew by sight into _the one who speaks Japanese and the one who doesn't speak Japanese_. It would have been nicer to have been called Japanese instead of simply someone who spoke the language, but that was likely too much to hope for in any case. "I am." The tiny unnecessary words that made up polite, personable conversation were always the first he skipped when he spoke English or French, but they came to him easily enough in the language he'd gone years without speaking except as an occasional way to communicate clandestinely with Theodore. It was so strange, how things like that worked.

"Good," she said. As the gap closed between them he could see that she looked healthy, flush, with no pockmarks or pallor or shivering- no pox, no consumption, no ague. It was rare to come across a person so utterly _healthy_-looking here, where there was no sun and so little rain and nothing but the incessant dry wind and twilight that never lifted. She didn't even look like she was starving. "We were afraid you'd all been scared off. No one has seen your people come around since my uncle went raving at you."

"Raving?" Kanda echoed. That man hadn't seemed crazy- quite the opposite, actually. He had totally lacked both the mad wrongness of this new mystery and the old madness of those who'd broken under the strain of living in this godforsaken place. This cheerful-looking young woman's so-called raving uncle was absolutely not a madman to Kanda's memory, and working for the Order meant that one saw a great many and varied forms of madness. Some of them were subtle, some of them had to be looked closely for, but none of them looked so horrifically lucid as that man: someone who had seen the face of evil but had not the fortune to go mad from it. It was the same lucidity one saw in so many Finders and Exorcists alike after any amount of time in the field. He'd been as desperately, unfortunately sane as any of them in the chapterhouse.

"We thought it was good not to ignore him until we were sure," he said slowly, hating that he must have sounded terribly young or unlearned in Japanese. He'd have been much more proficient talking to her in his second or third languages, having spoken them more often and in greater complexity than the one of his childhood- _we thought it prudent_ was something he couldn't phrase properly in his first language, because he just didn't have the complexity of vocabulary. He... had, well, the vocabulary of a nine year old boy, if he were in the mood for total honesty, because of course there were no teachers and precious few books outside of Japan in which to expand it to the vocabulary of a learned man.

Her hair was warmer brown than his, a little lighter. It was the first time he had come so close to someone from his own country in years and years without her recoiling, except for the very, very few times he saw the few Japanese personnel at the Asia Branch motherhouse. And that had been a brief, harried stay where Kanda had spent most of his time either a prisoner of the infirmary or listening to Bookman-the-moron (as opposed to Bookman-not-the-moron, who had unfortunately seen fit to die right after the glory was had and the dirty, demanding cleanup work began and had thus lowered himself immeasurably in Kanda's esteem). Kanda had not exactly spent any of that time scrutinizing the handful of Japanese refugees employed by that branch of the Order.

It was strange, because he was here and all he could do was compare how he looked to how she looked. He was almost assessing his own state of being Japanese by comparing himself to her, like he was afraid that somehow it had all osmosed out of him and been replaced by something Chinese or French or English.

Her hair was a little lighter, a little warmer brown. They were both pale, because they'd both spent years under the sky without sunlight, but as he'd observed at first she was flushed and healthy instead of ashen. Her eyes, though- he remembered dark eyes, black and brown as everyone he'd met in China, as dark as Chaoji or Lenalee had. Even his own— which had been strange enough to draw comments when he was young— were a very _dark_ blue, close to black if the light was low or someone wasn't looking closely. Hers were pale and watery, like where the slate sea met the slate sky in one depressing, unchanging line on the horizon. Pale like Allen Walker's good eye, or Theodore's eyes, or those of any number of people he had met while living in Europe. They were not eyes he had ever seen before leaving Japan, and they certainly looked out of place on her. His first thought was that perhaps she was part foreign— this was what had once been a port, after all- but she didn't have any other look of it about her. She simply looked like a young Japanese woman with out of place eyes.

"You don't have to worry," she said, giving him a smile that was probably supposed to be reassuring but just looked bizarre. Everything about her, from the smiling to the out of place eyes to the fact she looked so healthy to the fact she was talking to him at all-

_Wrong_. She was wrong, and now that he had realized that it was the only thing he could see when he looked at her. All he could think about was that _somehow_ where she left off and the world around her began was such a jump from what was and what should have never been that it was completely and totally jarring. This girl didn't belong here, maybe didn't belong _anywhere_, just like the people Chaoji and Theodore had told him about but whom he'd never had the chance to see for himself up close.

"There is something very wrong here," he said, in a perfectly normal and level voice that didn't say anything as to how horrifying he suddenly found looking at her, how unbearable it was to stand so close to her that she could almost touch him.

He said it in French.

"What?" She asked, still in Japanese.

"Nothing," he said, in Japanese once again. "What were you doing on the beach, then? We heard you out there, and you never went out there until he told us about it."

"Celebrating," she said, smile growing wider in relief that it was something so easily explained. At least, that's what he thought she meant; it was hard to judge her facial expressions and body language when everything about her screamed that she wasn't like him at all. "Wouldn't you? _Didn't_you, when everything started getting better?"

Kanda had seen and heard innumerous victory celebrations and been roped into attending no few of those, and not a single one of them had been a midnight sabbat on a beach that might have still been in danger of a stray akuma attack in a land where the weather and the earth and the water hadn't yet recovered from the pollution. Not even the seediest ones that Ravi (because he hadn't been Bookman yet back then, and the real Bookman hadn't known about all of those parties or else Ravi would have been on a train to a monastery in Kathmandu before he could blink his only remaining eye) had sought out on the Mediterranean. People who were that bad off hadn't stopped to celebrate the end of the Earl; instead they'd used the hope and assurance that nothing else would happen to them like that again as inspiration to finally take action and begin rebuilding their lives. They planted gardens and bought cows and let their children go outside; they didn't gather on a desolate beach at midnight and do God only knew what. And their neighbors certainly didn't go around spouting mad warnings- warnings of that sort wouldn't have been seen as mad. Had this been any other place just recovering, that man's words would have been heeded, not ridiculed.

"I didn't," Kanda said, his grin more teeth than reassurance. That smirk was the closest thing he ever gave anyone to a smile in anatomy, though its meaning was quite the opposite. "I was busy."

"I suppose you would have been," she said, leaning forward. Where was Marie? He hadn't been that far away; there was no way he didn't hear Kanda's intentional lapse into French. He should have been here by now. "You should come the next time we meet. I don't think they would mind if it was you."

"Yes, that's why they spit on me and won't talk to me, except for the one you say is completely mad," he snapped, clinging to rudeness as a barrier that might put space between the two of them. If she was offended by his words then perhaps she'd step back and not touch him. He knew for some reason that he didn't want her to touch him even more than he usually didn't want people doing it. With most people it was a dislike of them getting close, of the waste of time, of his own weakness, but this- it was like a fear he hadn't known he had, racing through him at the thought of her touching him.

A lot of people in the Order back during the height of the war would have said that Yuu Kanda was fearless, and they would have been dead wrong. No one fearless lived long in Japan, not even under the care of cautious parents; he feared a break in routine, some dangerous deviation in his life that meant his world was being threatened. Disturbances in the night, unheralded storms, strangers with no logical reason to speak to him- these were all the sorts of things that made Kanda very nervous, though he had grown very adept at hiding them from ten years living in a land where such fears were irrational and subject to ridicule rather than absolutely necessary for survival. And the very thought of her laying a hand on him frightened him more than half-imagined Noah outside the window ever had when he was small, back before he'd learned the hard way that fearing such things would earn him jeering from Deesha and a promise of more ridicule to come when he gleefully told the little girls who would eventually grow up to be General Klaud's team. It terrified Kanda more than the thought of dying useless did.

Then she put her hand on his wrist. Even through the fabric of his shirt it was uncomfortable, and where her bare hand touched his, his skin positively crawled. He actually _flinched_, when he had been training himself for over a decade not to have such obvious fear reactions.

"Don't," he said, a break between the words as he fumbled to find his voice, "don't. Don't touch me." He pulled his hand away, heedless of how rude he might seem. She shouldn't have been talking to him in the first place, she shouldn't have _been_ anywhere in the first place. Wrong, wrong,_wrong_. It was so wrong that it set off every single fight or flight reflex in Yuu Kanda's body and they had all come down firmly on the side of _flight_. Where was Marie? He took a stumbling step backward, desperate just to put some space between himself and this feeling of something that shouldn't exist.

"Are you all right?" She asked, a parody of wide-eyed curiosity and concern. _Wrong_. He took another step back, and she reached forward, so whip-quickly that she surprised even his fear-honed reflexes. "What's wrong?"

"What's wrong?" Now he was hearing the same thing echoed in different languages- no, that was Marie, not a hallucination born of adrenaline and terror. It was Marie, finally there. What had taken him so long? He hadn't been far away, and he was more than close enough to hear Kanda signal distress in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice.

"We're leaving," he managed to croak out, taking another step back and another until he stumbled right into the broad obstacle of Marie.

"Kanda?" Marie asked, putting a hand to Kanda's shoulder rather than stepping back as he normally would. "Are you all right?"

"I'll be fine when we leave," he said. Marie might not have been able to see her, but couldn't he tell from the way she breathed or the way her feet shifted or any of the other hundred tiny things no one else could hear that she didn't belong? "Don't touch me," he warned her again, and Marie dropped his hands. Oh, had he spoken in French or English? He'd thought it was Japanese, so he repeated it again in Japanese just to be sure that she understood.

"Kanda, who are you talking to?" Marie asked, taking him by the shoulder and turning him around so that his back was to the dreadful woman.

"Can't you hear her?" He asked, trying to pull away and finding that, disgustingly, he couldn't; Marie was a strong a man as his size implied, and evidently had a much better- or more determined, at least- grip than the girl. "She's right behind me."

"Kanda," Marie repeated. Couldn't he do anything besides say Kanda's name? He was being as bad as Walker or Theodore, _Kanda, Kanda, Kanda_ or worse, _Yuu, Yuu, Yuu_. Then he was getting shaken; Marie had him by both shoulders and was shaking him like he was trying to wake him from a nightmare. "Your pulse is off, and your fever is back."

"I haven't got a fever. And even if I have, we have more important things to worry about," he said, and it wasn't like Marie to worry about things like that when there was more important business immediately at hand. Couldn't he hear her? "She's off, like the ones Theodore met."

"Kanda, there's no one there!" Marie had stopped shaking him and actually sounded alarmed, and didn't relinquish his grip on Kanda's shoulders. "All I've heard is you talking to yourself in Japanese, and then all of a sudden you saying there was something wrong."

"She was there!" He held up the arm where she'd grabbed him, as if that would tell Marie anything. Not that it would tell a man with perfect vision anything, either- no, wait. There was a purple bruise ringing his wrist, as if her grip had been tight enough to cause it. It certainly hadn't felt like that, and she hadn't looked anywhere near strong enough.

"We're going back to Theodore," Marie said, holding fast to Kanda's shoulders and forcing him into one stumbling step and then another, until they were walking away. "You need to rest."

"Kanda, she doesn't-"

* * *

Bookman was exceedingly careful with the volumes he packed in the waterproof trunk, both because he needed to be selective in order to fit the most helpful information possible into the smallest space possible and because he was not about to take anything irreplaceable on a ship anywhere. Let alone into Japan, where it was liable to be dropped into the ocean or lit on fire or sliced into innumerable tiny pieces the first time he really said something to set Yuu into a strop. The Bible and its common Apocrypha were out, because even if they were needed (and he rather doubted that they would be, because those sorts of things tended to be connected to the Earl and Bak seemed convinced that this wasn't, theory of rogue Innocence or not) General Theodore would have a copy on hand he could look through. A devout man, Froi Theodore. So were the more common volumes of Sumerian myth and religion, because he had committed their salient facts to memory a very long time ago. There was no need to bring the books of Chinese ideas, because Bak would be able to procure his own copies in Shanghai and that meant Bookman wouldn't have to risk the ones his predecessors had gathered here. The less esoteric Indian volumes were the same, but the sole book dealing with the more arcane gods and monsters of the Japanese archipelago was carefully wrapped in oilcloth and placed into the trunk; it was very possible that even the seemingly infinite capital and prestige of Bak Chang could not procure what did not exist anymore, what the Earl and the akuma had long ago stamped out.

The Greek volumes stayed for the same reason the Sumerian ones did, but a few of the more arcane Sanskrit works went into careful oilcloth bundles the same as the Japanese had. He briefly considered a few works on the more arcane aspects of Cybele (the obscure works of an already obscure cult, which made them both truly valuable to this investigation given the tiny chance that such an investigation was necessary and truly irreplaceable even in the vast annals of the libraries of the Bookmen) and ultimately decided against them merely because there was so much risk for so little potential gain. It was more than passing strange, to be the one who had to worry about the safety of the tomes under his care now; he could understand now exactly why the old man had been so furious whenever he felt that his apprentice hadn't taken proper care with a book.

Would that he could focus on the duty that was supposed to be his primary- even sole, since he didn't have an apprentice to care for yet- responsibility now that the war was over. But no, Leverrier and the rest of them in the Vatican weren't finished with him yet, and as his conversation with Bak a day previous had shown him they still had the ultimate leverage over his head. By the time he could safely flout their authority because he had a suitably trained apprentice to take his place should they make good on their threats and allow him to Fall because of a refusal to follow their orders over his own, it would be nothing more than a moot point because they would all be dead or at the very least their order defunct. There were fewer and fewer akuma anywhere to be found; even here in the jungles and in such close proximity to the akuma factories of Edo, he hadn't found anything after his first seven weeks in Bangkok and only a few scattered rogues in the jungles when he ventured deeper. Truth be told, he had spent most of his assignment after that in Angkor Wat, content to study what he found there at the same time he acted as a beacon to draw any remaining akuma away from the cities. Eventually he'd decided it was safe to take up semi-permanent residence in Siam Riep and immerse himself in the libraries of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, poking his head up from his Bookman duties only at the scattered _credible_ reports of akuma.

Yes, credible. If he was a Bookman first and an Exorcist second, he was going to act like it, and that meant triaging his time. Credible threats had to be investigated because he owed that to the people he was protecting, and possible threats warranted further study and a reasoned decision whether or not to actually deploy himself. Unlikely or impossible reports he ignored, and so far no one had reported any ill effects from Bookman's less than due diligence in Order matters. Besides Bak Chang, that was, and his ill effects mostly took the form of borderline apoplexy. That man was going to work himself into a very early grave if he didn't calm down.

Allen would have had his head, had he heard his old friend talking like that. He liked to think that didn't bother him, because he wasn't technically speaking Allen's old friend (even if he knew that was an absolute lie), but it did on some level that a Bookman wasn't supposed to have. Lenalee wouldn't have taken his head off, but she would have looked at him all disapproving and sad like she was truly more grieved about the state of Bookman's soul than she was about the theoretical dead civilians. Yuu would have understood, though; he would have done his damndest not to have to do it, going for two or three days or more on end without sleep or food if he had to, spending every instant of every minute of every hour attempting to investigate every single threat as thoroughly as he could. When that inevitably failed, though, he would admit that the triage method was for the best. Yes, Yuu could admit that they had to choose who to save and what to follow up on the way Allen refused to and Lenalee liked to pretend she didn't have to.

Now he was performing triage on his library the same was he was with missions. The old man would have probably had his head for the former as much as Bak would have for the latter- though perhaps not, what with the _abridged editions_ lurking around this library. This had been one of the countries they hadn't spent much time in when he was a child, Thailand; he'd been here once or twice for a few months at a time, but the previous Bookman had preferred drier climes where the pages of books wouldn't moulder and rot if not impeccably cared for in ways that obviously did not happen in long-abandoned libraries. But even with that in mind, how a Bookman of any sort had allowed less than the true, real history into his library was completely and utterly beyond him. He hadn't had the chance to read Abdul Al-Hazred's work, but given the fact it was likely junk it would make for safe reading on the voyage. And on the miniscule chance that it was something valuable, perhaps it could even help. At the very least it was a work that Bookman had never seen cross-referenced in another volume by an author Bookman had never seen attributed, quoted, or refuted anywhere else, and that was intriguing in and of itself. Almost every other book had at the very least a mention of why it was wrong and ignored in _some_ other reference.

Abdul Al-Hazred was a ghost. His works might as well not have existed outside of that one abridged volume that had narrowly escaped water damage in Angkor Wat. So Bookman wrapped it in oilcloth and set it on top of the volumes in the trunk for easy removal, since he was going to be looking through it long before he landed in Nagoya.

* * *

**setting notes**: Siam Riep and Angkor Wat were in Thailand at this point in history and thus are referred to as being in Thailand in this story; they didn't revert to Cambodia until 1907. Kanda's backstory: 100% non-canonical now, obviously (this was written in 2009). And on a setting note, in my headcanon (and thus in all my -Man stories), the Asia Branch HQ is located in Shanghai. The other branch locations are Inverness, Beirut, Mexico City (pfft, you think a Catholic paramilitary organization would have been allowed large-scale operations in the United States in the 1860s?), and Port Moresby.


End file.
